Thoughts of a wife, mother and historian (not necessarily in that order).

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Breaking the silence

It’s been a long time since I have posted, over three months in fact. This is not down to a lack of material to write about (I have pondered at least a post a month which has never been written) and only slightly to do with lack of time (although I am pleased to say that the book is now four draft chapters long and well on the way to being completed in draft form). Rather, I have got out of the habit of blogging and have struggled to get back into it.

Posting on here requires me to make the time to identify subjects, think them through and actually write posts down. Other things have to take a lower priority for this to happen and, as Matt Houlbrook recently pointed out, there are times when other things need to be prioritized. Life can be more than history, and neither history nor historical blogging can alway console us for everything life throws us.

But there comes a point when even the priorities beyond history cease, at least temporarily, to be so compelling, when the deadlines retreat for a while, when the business of teaching and admin and childcare and housework have the potential to be treated as background noise rather than the narrative itself. But restarting old habits, however beneficial we may know them to be, can be difficult. Blogging, like any other form of writing, at least for me, is a form of concentrated labour that needs time and space, time and space which need to be consciously carved out of already crowded days. Forcing myself to do something that is difficult and time consuming but which has no deadline may be a very good self-mortifying discipline; that doesn’t mean I can or will do it.

So, in an attempt to get myself back into the habit of finding some time and space to write in this voice, a voice which I know is important to me both personally and professionally, I present you with the following query and half-formed thoughts which arose yesterday when I asked on Twitter whether any historians had included details of childcare responsiblities in their grant applications. I received no more than a dozen responses, so this is a deeply unscientific survey, but the results interested me on a number of levels. From the answers I did receive the following information emerged:

– The inclusion of childcare most often occurs as an explanation for past behaviours (time off for maternity leave) rather than as justification for proposed future behaviours (such as why a certain number of research trips of a certain length have been budgeted for).

– Some funders (take a bow, AHRC) have specific policies for taking childcare responsiblities into consideration. I did not know this. I am very glad I do now.

– There is a US/UK divide, with US applicants much more willing to view childcare as a legitimate concern of funders than UK applicants.

– Almost all responses were from women. Where men did responded it tended to be to be in relation of their female partner’s applications, rather than their own.

– All responses expressing anxiety about how the inclusion of childcare would be viewed by funders came from women, but so did the cheerleading for funders who explicitly stated that childcare consideration could and should be included in applications.

As I say, the tiny sample of responses makes any conclusions difficult to draw, even if I had any, but I remain interested in seeing where this discussion might take me, not least because of my own responses. I have never included childcare in any application beyond the statement of maternity leave taken and the inclusion of my children’s birth certificates as evidence of my qualification for time credited for leave. But now I am seriously questioning whether I should have done or do so in the future.

Thinking about it, I realise the extent to which I still separate my caring responsiblities from my professional identity, despite the immense impact they have on each other, an impact I freely acknowledge here. How I ensure my children are properly cared for while fulfilling my obligations as a researcher and a teacher is an immensely complicated issue requiring great good will from many others (as I was reminded when my son fell ill two hours before my husband was due at work and 2.5 hours before I was due to teach as seminar). Yet I still assume that sorting them out is my responsibillity rather than my funders. That others, funders and academics, don’t see it as such is both cheering and challenging.

There is also a question of gender to be addressed, a question that seems obvious but which I find surprisingly hard to articulate. Is childcare still a dominant concern of women? Are men more confident in asserting their right to have childcare responsibilities taken into account? If so, why? And what about other caring responsibilities? Like so many of my colleagues, the necessity of caring for aging parents is becoming an increasing demand on my time and emotional energy, time and emotional energy that cannot then be invested in research.

I will need to think more about this, ask more questions, have more discussions, write more blog posts. If I want to change the status quo, my own as much as anything, I need to break silence.

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6 thoughts on “Breaking the silence”

Will never forget my friend Wendy’s reply to her husband when their elder child fell ill. Husband said, ‘but I’ve got a very important meeting with three key clients, i can’t stay with [child].’. Wendy said: ‘I’ve got 300 students waiting to be taught. You’re staying.’ They were divorced not many months later (amicably). My point being, can we measure the importance of a job by the number of people it affects when childcare takes priority?

A good point. In our case, the problem was less people affected than a culture of presenteeism at my husband’s place of work. Thank goodness for grandparents, in this case, otherwise I would have had to cancel the class, I suspect.

I don’t have children, so I haven’t need to cover my own childcare responsibilities. But I included a significant ‘childcare contingency’ in a research network grant application–though primarily to support some of the costs of _non_-academic participants–with a clear statement that myself and the co-I, and the main external organization we were collaborating with, viewed them as essential. This application was highly rated but not funded: ‘the costings were on the high side’. We’d pared every other cost to the bone to allow for a meaningful childcare budget.

Future grant applications that I write that might involve participants with children (academic or not) will include a childcare contingency as a matter of course. Childcare costs need to be normalized as an obvious and basic part of funding applications.

So: thank you for breaking this silence! Now if only my own institution would provide adequate childcare…

And thank you for sharing. Knowing that other people have done this gives me courage to add childcare into grant applications in future. And as you say, getting institutional support is a necessity too.